Today you will play the role of educator. Often the best way to learn a concept is to think about how you would teach it to others. It forces you to evaluate which pieces of information are important and quickly identifies your own areas of weakness on a topic. Work your way through the steps below to create an informative info-graphic that explains the complicated topic of vaccination to an audience of your choosing.
Your Audience
Identifying your audience is a critical step in the creative process. For this assignment, you can choose one of the following three groups:
A classroom of grade 7 students
A classroom of your peers
A classroom of new parents with babies
Your Process
To plan an effective infographic, you may want to plan out what you actually intend to convey. Either on a piece of paper or with a digital tool, brainstorm some of the things you intend to include - statistics, figures, pictures, and diagrams. You should include a good mix of media. Pictures alone will not explain a concept, but neither will a wall of text. If this were an infographic for a woodworking plan, you might draw a box in one corner of your page and indicate that you want a picture of a table saw there overlaid with a critical statistic about table saw usage. This planning will make creating your infographic much smoother.
Things To Note
Keep in mind what you are trying to teach. You want this age group to understand the importance of vaccinations. You also want to educate them on the mechanics of vaccination and how it works. Both of these considerations must be addressed to do well on this project.
Your Science
You are encouraged to make your infographics visually appealing and interesting, but you also need to include some hard science. You should ensure that you understand and correctly include the types of immune cells responsible for specific (cell-mediated) immune response. Phagocytes, B-cells, T-cells, antigens, and antibodies should all be included in your responses. A passing understanding of these terms is not enough- you will need to understand them more thoroughly to create your own educational materials.
YOUr Tools
As the internet is constantly evolving and new web tools become continuously available, you may use any infographic creation tool. Make sure to approve it with your teacher before use. Though it is possible to make an infographic with something as simple as PowerPoint, a number of tools exist that allow you to create a very polished product. Some of the best are:
Though tutorials exist for most of these tools, they are all quite self-explanatory. Dive right in and start creating!
Once you are finished, submit your infographic to your teacher. You are encouraged to check the rubric on the evaluation page to see exactly how you will be marked. Finally, complete (5) of the extension questions listed on the evaluation page. These will also need to be submitted to your teacher.